Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Who is Heather Zichal?

By Alan
Caruba

The news
on Monday, October 7th, included a notice that Heather Zichal would
be leaving her White House job as Obama’s “top adviser on environmental and
climate issues.” And I asked myself who is Heather Zichal?

In fact,
Ms. Zichal had served in an advisory position for five years. In her current
position, she replaced the “climate and energy czar”, Carol Browner, who left
in March 2011. Browner had formerly been the Director of the Environmental
Protection Agency where she did her best to impose some of the most draconian
environmental policies; a task taken up by Lisa Jackson until she recently
stepped down and was replaced by Gina McCarthy. It says a lot about this agency
that during the government shutdown, it furloughed 93% of its employees as
“non-essential.”

In July
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) penned a Wall Street Journal’s commentary, “The EPA’s Game of Secret Science”, noting “As the Environmental Protection Agency moves
forward with some of the most costly regulations in history, there needs to be
greater transparency about the claimed benefits from these actions.
Unfortunately, President Obama and the EPA have been unwilling to reveal to the
American people the data they use to justify their multibillion-dollar
regulatory agenda.” Rep. Smith is chairman of the House Committee on Science,
Space and Technology.

Ms. Zichal
has managed to maintain a very low profile during her White House career. Trying
to find articles that profile or quote her turned out to be a real task. Part
of the reason for this may be her political instincts and experience. She has
been active since her days in college following a duel track of politics and
environmental issues. She quickly came to the notice of Democrat Rush D. Holt,
Jr. (NJ) when she was an intern at the state chapter of the Sierra Club and he
was running for office. Holt hired her as a legislative director.

Ms. Zichal
would later hold the same position for Rep. Frank Pallone from 2001-2002 before
serving Senator John Kerry from 2002-2008. She would be an advisor to Kerry’s
2004 presidential campaign and the 2008 Obama campaign. Throughout her career
she has been devoted to the global warming/climate change hoax. After Browner’s
departure, she served on the White House Domestic Policy Council because
Congress abolished the funding for Browner’s position in an agreement that
averted a government shutdown in 2011

In what
appears to be a rare interview, prior to the 2008 election Ms. Zichal was
profiled in Grist magazine, an environmental publication. She spouted all the
usual nonsense about greenhouse gas emissions, “clean coal”, and “how a
President Obama would craft a bipartisan plan to address climate change.” At
the time she said that Obama’s “climate and energy policy go hand-in-hand. His
goal would be to try and move climate legislation in tandem with energy
legislation.”

She was
correct in that prediction and the result has been an all-out war on coal with
the EPA relying on hidden, bogus “scientific” data to justify it. In the Grist
article, Ms. Zichal said that Obama would call for “an aggressive 80 percent
emissions reduction.” Since there has been no warming trend since 1998 and no
connection between carbon dioxide and the non-existent warming, the need for
such a reduction is zero.

Despite
the administration’s best efforts, the energy sector, other than coal, has been
growing as the result of the fracking technology that has made recovery of the
nation’s vast oil and natural gas reserves possible. Along the way the
administration wasted billions on loans to so-called “renewable” wind and solar
energy companies, most of whom quickly went bankrupt.

Energy
industry expert, Robert Bradley, Jr., writing on the Master Resource website in
June 2012 took note of a Greenwire—Energy & Environmental News—profile of
Ms. Zichal noting that, for all her talk about “outreach” to sectors of the
energy industry, “we have the irony of Ms. Zichal trying to square the circle
of real consumer-driven energy vs. politically correct energy.”

In point
of fact, Ms. Zichal has been a behind-the-scenes player in the Obama
administration’s advancement of the global warming/climate change hoax, in
efforts to shut down coal-fired plants, and thwarting access to the estimated
ten billion barrels of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, along
with other ways to limit the production of energy the nation requires.

The recent
report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally admitted
the fact that the planet has been in a cooling cycle for nearly seventeen
years. The report has been thoroughly discredited as regards the “science” it
has been citing; based almost entirely on rigged computer models.

The White
House cited Ms. Zichal for the work she has performed there, “most recently
developing our bold climate action plan”, saying she will be missed. The notion
that the White House or any other entity on Earth could do anything about the
climate is absurd.

“Heather
will be missed here at the White House, but our work on this important issue
will go on”, said the announcement of her departure. I’m guessing that she will
find a new job with the Sierra Club or some similar environmental organization
devoted to harming the best interests of the nation.

3 comments:

That grist site is a leftest/progressive pub if I ever saw one. A friend of mine pointed it to me years ago as a cousin of his has dealings with them somehow or other. I ignore it for the most part. I even met his cousin a few years ago. Nice man but he's an academic and follows their thinking. Brain washed.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.